Bonhams will be offering the Lotus Esprit Coupé used in the James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me in their December 1, 2008 auction in Olympia, London.
The vehicle is part of Sale 16256 – “Important Collectors’ Motor Cars, Pioneer and Vintage Motorcycles and Fine Automobilia”, Lot No 679.
Full details can be found at Bonhams.com
Auction Description:
Just for James Bond, the Lotus Esprit goes submarine.
by Doug NyePutting your car on the silver screen is a public relations coup by any standard, but winning a starring role in the new James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me, is a step beyond even that. And it was a Lotus Esprit that was chosen as the kind of sophisticated and very British (said between clenched teeth) performance car which Bond would select to replace his trusty Aston Martin. The idea is that Bond’s Esprit is a multi-role combat vehicle. On the road it has cement dispensers which emerge from the rear bay to repel pursuers. A vertical missile rack takes pot-shots at shadowing helicopters, while after a spectacular chase ending in a long charge on a short pier the Esprit takes to the water. As it sinks from sight the wheels assume the ultimate in negative camber, farings clunk shut over the wheel-arches, reinforcing bars appear across the screen and side windows, dive planes emerge on either side front and rear, and a 4-screw drive unit emerges from beneath the tail. Two vertical fins fold up for stability and, with missiles armed for both vertical and forward fire, our hero goes to war. After spectacular underwater shenanigans, the Esprit’s submarine gadgetry folds away and the little Lotus drives up out of the sea onto the beach past some startled sunbathers.
Two Esprits were loaned to the film’s producer, Cubby Broccoli (did you know his uncle was the man who introduced said vegetable to the U.S. market!), and they spent most of the last September and October chasing one another around the Sardinian mountains, being pursued but never caught by a fleet of Ford Taunus sedans. One Esprit was built into camera car with three Panavision cameras, complete with power packs on its nose. The director sat in the passenger seat beside Lotus PR man Don McLauchlin and two intrepid cameramen white-knuckled it on either side of the engine cover. Just the idea was bad enough, McLauchlin claims, but when he had to stay in contact with the other Esprit at 70-80 mph on winding mountain roads the reality was a darned sight worse. On one occasion the helpful Sardinian police rushed off to close a stretch of road for a chase scene, only for the high-speed filming convoy to come face-to-face with a truck, a bus and a car leading to phenomenal avoidances. It was discovered that the two police motorcyclists had closed off the same end of the road. They had been hidden from each other round a corner when they radioed in that the road was secure.
Meanwhile special effect supervisor Derek Meddings had flown to Florida to Perry Submarines, a company specialising in midget subs. They provided the gear which turned the Esprit into the world’s prettiest U-boat. Initially there were reservations about the Esprit’s bodyshape. Something designed to give negative lift in a fluid called air isn’t easy to keep off the bottom when operated in seawater. Equally they didn’t like the movie designer’s dive-planes but he insisted on them as part of the image. In practice, hydrodynamic downthrust on the Esprit’s swoopy nose and windscreen was adequately balanced out by setting the nose planes hard to rise and the tail planes hard to dive.
Petty fitted four electric submersible drive units to the Esprit’s retractable rear tray, each with steering vanes in the propeller stream. The vertical fins were locked off and acted purely as stabilisers while the car’s center section was packed with oil-filled battery units. To avoid pressurisation and sealing problems, the Esprit was in reality a wet submarine crewed by a pair of lung divers. With the windows barred, visibility was minimal, so a twin-mirror system was fitted to give the driver/diver a view of the bottom.
With no reverse thrust and thus no brakes, the 15-knot Lotus sub was an underwater bull in a china shop and the underwater film crew stood more chance of becoming traffic casualties in the clear waters of Nassau’s Coral Harbour than they did on dry land. The only way to slow the car was to switch off its motors and trust to the attendant divers to haul it in before a coral head loomed up. Meddings was convinced his creation was going to wreck itself in this way, but the underwater crew of seven Britons, three Americans and a Bahamaian made sure that never happened. Motors off, the Esprit would settle to the bottom and it could be lifted from there by three divers.
Evidently its missile firing underwater was supremely impressive, Meddings vividly recalling the thump of released air as projectiles sped on their way. The weapons were also accurate and the divers amused themselves by floating around near the end of their run and catching the expended rounds before they lost all speed.
Underwater the Perry-ized Esprit had a turning circle of around 20ft and its dive and climb performance was crisply argonautic, controlled by foot pedals and a joystick. Down in the blue it was joined by Meddings’ other creations, a pair of 25 ft model nuclear submarines and, would you believe, a 63 ft model supertanker! They’re still out there somewhere, down on the bottom providing shelter for Bahamaian crayfish.
This article was contemporarily published in the Road and Track Magagine. Reproduced with the permission of Doug Nye, renowned Motor Historian and Bonhams Consultant.
Footnote:
This Lotus Esprit is one of two complete, fully functioning cars that were used for the driving scenes in the motion picture ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, starring Roger Moore as secret agent James Bond, ‘007′. Approximately nine Esprits were used in different guises, but bar these two the rest were shells, some of which were used in filming the Esprit’s transformation into a submersible. Once fully submerged, the Esprit was represented by a radio-controlled model. One of the two ‘proper’ cars was used for the chase scene in which it was driven by Roger Becker, now Director of Engineering at Lotus Cars. The Esprit offered here was used in the scene where ‘Q’ drives off the ferry in Sardinia, instructs Bond in its operation, and the car is then driven away by Bond and his companion, agent Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach). Roger Becker confirmed this to trimmer Nick Fulcher when he visited Nick’s workshop during the car’s recent restoration.
This is the only one of the two fully functioning Esprits that had the missile launching button on the gear stick and the special revised housing for the clock/periscope screen. The car was taken directly off the production line and sent straight to Pinewood Studios where it was trimmed by Nick Fulcher, who was then working as a trim engineer at Lotus. Nick collaborated with production designer, Ken Adam to achieve the desired specification, removing the colourful tartan headrests, which reflected on the actors’ faces, and changing them to plain green. As well as the quayside scene, this particular Esprit was converted for use as a camera car in filming the dramatic chase along the Sardinian mountain roads, there being no alternative vehicle available that could keep up with the other one!
After the movie’s completion, the car was despatched Lotus and put back on the production line to be returned to standard trim and sold on. The mounting for the clock was removed, the seats and headrests returned to standard, the engine serviced and a black Lotus badge put on. This ex-Bond Esprit later passed into German ownership, its last long-term owner in that country carrying out a mechanical restoration.
When the current owner acquired the car it was German registered and had an incorrect interior, so Nick Fulcher was commissioned to completely restore the interior and return it to the specification as used in the movie. Fortunately, he still had supplies of the original cloth and sufficient original carpet to trim just one car. (When the interior was stripped, some of the original carpet was found stuck to the transmission tunnel). Nick painstakingly restored the interior and a full photographic record of this is in the history file. The seats were stripped back to the bare frames, the correct extruded aluminium trim made, a original and correct VDU clock sourced and mounted between the sun visors, an original Motorola radio fitted, and he even found a spare missile launch button in his stores! Costing £14,500, the end result is a credit to Nick’s craftsmanship.
Of all the many hundreds of ‘movie cars’, none is more desirable than one of the exclusive band with a James Bond connection, examples of which are offered for sale only rarely. Representing a wonderful opportunity to acquire one of cinema’s most celebrated motor cars, this faithfully restored Esprit is presented in excellent condition and offered with a history file containing copies of the factory records (annotated ‘007′), assorted photographs of the restoration and an owners manual (for a Series 2)
Photography:
Jason De Bord